Have you thanked Rodd and Jasmine Lowell lately?  They volunteer so much time with our worship ministry that I often jokingly refer to them as “unpaid staff.”  They are here for about two hours once a week in the evening to lead our worship team practice.  They are here about fifty Sundays a year to lead worship for two services.  They are often here early on Sunday morning before many of the rest of us are even awake, preparing to lead our church family in worship.

All of that volunteer time doesn’t include the behind-the-scenes work that Rodd and Jas do in picking out songs and planning all of our worship services.  And it doesn’t include time spent listening to new music to introduce to us; reading articles and books on worship; attending training sessions and seminars, and more.

Sometimes I believe that many people think that leading worship just means that you pick a couple of cools songs or choose a music style that suits the most people in our gathering on Sunday morning.  But it’s so much more than that.

Worship ministry is about engaging people in a sacred moment of community; a moment where the entire sum of our beings joins together to worship God; a moment where all of our voices and our minds and our ears and our hearts and our bodies are joined together and pointing in the same direction – toward the Lord God Almighty.

Rodd and Jas understand this and are committed to leading our church gatherings on Sunday into the presence and the glory of God.  They do a tremendous job of it, and we are so fortunate to have them in our church family.  Please take the time this month to express your thanks to them!

Thank you, Jenison family, for the privilege of serving with you.  My family and I are so blessed to be able to work with you.  We love you!

http://www.musicademy.com/2010/05/worship-trainwreck-from-martin-smith/

Based out of the UK, many of the contributors to Musicademy are professional musicians who have played with everyone from Delirious to Tim Hughes to Matt Redman to Chris Tomlin (my apologies for that last one….) :-/

They’ve got great hearts - both for the spiritual and the technical aspects of worship.  They are skilled at helping amateur bands (like those of us in many of our churches) progress in our technical skills and learn what it is like to play in a band with other musicians.

Right now they are running a series of articles entitled 50 Tips - Playing Together As A Team.  They are posting them in sections - 10 tips at a time.  Here’s a link to the second set of tips….

And the main blog page is here…

I was a cabin dad, played in the worship band, talked at campfire one night, led a small group twice a day, played the role of a human pinata on the water basketball court every day, bruised my entire body on the slip and slide, had egg in my face, went head first into the mud pit during tug-of-war, was entirely covered with shaving cream during the shaving cream battle, scored a record for the most straws ever collected as a “natural disaster” in the Foxes and Frogs game, played some vicious Pong with Joe from Minerva, Ohio, ate pretty well, whitewater rafted down the river about 7 or 8 times, learned a magician’s card trick, never got found during the faculty hunt, and helped take care of Samantha whenever I got the chance.

Michiana is a great camp and I look forward to going back next summer.  The dean, Rob Schwarz, is a great guy.  And the other faculty members were great also.  I made a few new friends, as always (what’s up Jerry?) and hopefully made a difference to a few kids during the week.  I did my best anyway.

I might be involved with their wilderness camping program in some aspect next year, though, instead of Jr. High 1.  We will see what the future holds!

If I ever get my camera fixed I’ll try to remember to come back and post some pics of the week here….

I love camp.  It’s made a difference in my life, and I’ve seen it work on so many other people also.

Here’s some totally random thoughts on camp….

Rise and Shine

Run up the flag and doing devotions

Tetherball

Baptisms in the river and in the lake

Potlicking on the lodge side

Late night pranks

Raiding the fridge

Round Lake

Ralph

Marla

Jeff Curtis and I hammering Coop on the basketball court when he was about 17.  It shut him up for at least a week.

Building the campfire on the lodge side

Jim and Brian Borton

Kevin Odor

Mike Tuttle

Mahoning Valley Christian Service Camp

The Hollar boys

14,000+ feet in Colorado (which time?)

Pat Hartson, the ultimate Mean Dean

Hitting the peak with my dad (HEY DUCK!), and having the photos to prove it (Thanks Richard)

Backpacking through the tail end of a hurricane in New Hampshire

40+ miles on the AT while carrying most of Mom’s gear

Capture the Flag

Mark Hamilton turning green in Leadville - and I mean that literally

Day hikes at Wilderness camp, with Penultimate Mean Dean - Jeremy “Red” Westbrook

Preaching vespers under the cliff

Bryan and Kate and Amanda and Tab and Dale and Darren (RIP) and Matt and Cade and Hillary and Maia and Jeremiah and Ed and Curtis and Angie and Jaime and Amy and Tab and Mark and Brian and Coop and Rob and ……………………………………………

Randy hitting on the faculty member (somebody with last name of Ferguson) who was about twice his age and married to a guy about 3 times his size lolololol

Leading worship with Micah Carrick when everything just went right

22 inch bass

Waking mom up at 5:30 AM to ask if she had some rope for our anchor (one of the biggest mistakes of my life)

I could go on forever, but I’ve got to get some more work done today.  We’re on vacation the week after camp, so I’ll be on hiatus for a couple of weeks at least….

This workshop, entitled Band On The Run, was put together by Bob Kauflin of Sovereign Grace Ministries.  Bob played keyboards for the group Glad for a number of years, and has more recently spent his time as a minister to various churches.  This particular video was shot at the WorshipGod’O8 Conference in Gaithersburg, MD.

If your church uses a worship band, or is thinking about beginning to use a worship band for Sunday morning services, this video is a MUST-SEE.  It is practical, it is spiritual, it is humorous, it is illuminative, it is enlightening.  I think it is simply fantastic - and virtually everyone at our training session thought so too.

Take a look at it, then send the link to your worship minister or the person who’s ultimately responsible for your worship band.  It will make a difference in your music on Sunday mornings!

Bill said, “Did you pick that last song for me?”

He was grinning from ear to ear, and slapped me on the back as he said it.  It was in truth the continuation of a conversation we’d had some weeks earlier, in which he wished aloud that our church would sing more of the old hymns.  Bill’s part of this original conversation consisted of neither some nostalgic pining for the good ol’ days, nor a bitter grudge expressed against newer hymns or songs or choruses.  His was not a selfish attitude, nor an angry expression toward anything contemporary.  It was simply a statement of his heart.  He loves hymns and wished that we would sing them.

I chuckled along with him, grinned back, and said, “Did you like that one?”  And as he walked away toward the back door, I called out, ”If you liked it, then I picked it just for you.”

Actually, I did pick that song just for Bill.  I had him in mind when I looked through our file folder full of music.  Out of the hundreds of songs I could have chosen for the closing song of the service, I chose “Victory In Jesus.”  And I chose it just for him.

I chose it so that he would be able to minister to the Lord.  I chose it so he could minister to his brothers and sisters in Christ who surrounded him that morning.  And I chose it so that we as a congregation could minister to him.

OK, perhaps I’ve overstated the facts.  Maybe I didn’t have precisely Bill in mind - but I did have his demographic in mind.  Is that a bad thing?  I hope not.  As a 36-year old associate minister who grew up in the church as a preacher’s kid, I love the hymns.  I guess in a way, that makes me a sort of dinosaur - some sort of anachronism.  I’m Gen-X, but I’ve got parents who grew up with a modern worldview.  So I like Tom Petty but I also like Tom and Dicky Smothers.  I love a great narrative but I also appreciate solid Christian apologetics.  I love “Power in the Blood”, but I also love “Happy Day” by Tim Hughes and various songs by Leeland.

Of course, I don’t love ALL the hymns.  But then, I don’t love all the songs that they put out on the local Christian radio station either.  There are crummy “new” songs just as surely as there are crummy hymns (“Trading My Sorrows” and “In The Garden” come to mind, respectively).  My former preacher said in a sermon on worship one time, “The great old hymns are great - not because they’re old, but because they’re great.”  As I was reflecting on the sermon later, I thought that it’s also true that “the great new songs are great - not because they’re new, but because they’re great.”

So Bill, I’m glad that you enjoyed singing “Victory in Jesus” on Sunday.  But I hope that you enjoyed singing all the other songs we sang as well, new as well as old.  Because when you worship through singing, it doesn’t really matter how old or new the song is.  There’s far more important things than the age of a song to think about while we’re worshipping.  ‘Course, I know you already knew that.    But remember, I picked THAT song just for you.

I’m speaking, of course, of the worship service train wreck.  The worship service where the legendary Murphy sticks his ugly little head out of his hole and says, “just when you think it can’t get any worse, here I come!”  You know, “when everything that can go wrong does go wrong.”  When the drummer is late to the stage and the piano player plays in the wrong key for half of the closing song and the worship leader (that’s me) can’t carry the tune in a refrigerator box, let alone a bucket.  It was bad.  Legendarily bad.  Bad in its entirety.

I’ve beat myself up about this for the last 26 hours.  David Crowder is singing in my headphones, “God of the heavens, take my breath away,” and  I’m thinking to myself that I think yesterday morning we probably took His breath away.  And not in a good way, if you know what I mean.

My preacher is a good and gracious man, and reminded me this morning of what the GM of the Detroit Red Wings told his coach last night on the flight home after they were beaten 8-0.  He said, “Coach, don’t show the team the video of this game.  This was an aberration.  It’s not who we are, really.  We’re going to make it like this never happened, cuz this wasn’t us out there tonight.”

That’s what I feel like - like we weren’t out there yesterday morning.  Our team was there, but they weren’t there, if you know what I mean.  It was a day to take the video and toss it in the trash.  Make it like it never happened.

There’s actually whole days, and even weeks, when I sure would like to toss the video away.  Make it like it never happened.  You know what I mean?  When everything that could possibly go wrong has indeed gone wrong, and I’ve been a part of it, unfortunately.  Right in the thick of it, actually.

God must be like the Red Wings’ GM, I think.  He says, “you know what Nate - that was an ugly day.  It was not good.  You know it, and I know it.  But you know what?  It really wasn’t you out there today.  That was an aberration.  That wasn’t who you really are.  Let’s just take the tape of that one and pitch it, what do you say?”

Psalm 103:12 - As far as east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.”   Without train wrecks, would there ever be a need for rescues?